Business

The oldest city of Germany, Kempten nowadays has 65,000 inhabitants and is the cultural and economic centre of the Allgäu region. As a shopping destination for more than half a million people in the region, even far into Austrian provinces Tyrol and Vorarlberg, Kempten has one of the highest centrality value of all German cities, and at the same time, unemployment is one of the lowest in Germany.

Kempten as a business location is attractive and in high demand. Kempten offers top infrastructure for successful business development: attractive areas for setting up business, effective traffic network, comprehensive educational offers, cultural variety, knowledge transfer by the local University of Applied Sciences, and a charming mixture of promising, fast-growing, young enterprises and well-established, craft, service and industrial businesses, which are well rooted in the city and its population but still very innovative – all this contributes to the attractiveness and unique charm of Kempten.

The city cares for a business-friendly, growth-supporting environment. Our top priority in this respect is to satisfy businessmen and entrepreneurs, to let them know that the city is a reliable partner for them.

What makes Kempten’s economic structure special is a sound mixture of enterprises from many different sectors which makes the city less susceptible to crises of one or two individual economic sectors. The biggest companies in the region have between 500 and 800 employees. Among them are chemical enterprises (Elektroschmelzwerk), mechanical engineering companies (Liebherr), packaging industry (CFS GmbH Kempten, VG Nicolaus), forwarding business (Dachser and others), the media sector with the Allgäu newspaper publishing house, and, traditionally, the dairy industry with the Edelweiß cheese factory and other dairy companies. All companies named have increased their employment numbers over the past few years, some of them even dramatically.

The city offers additional incentives by heavy investments into infrastructure that is bound to increase Kempten’s attractiveness as a location for business: new business areas are being offered, new residential areas created, the pedestrian area has been redesigned, a centrally located event, leisure and shopping mall has been attracted; this and other measures have further strengthened Kempten as a location for business, shopping and living.